riadsala

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Everything posted by riadsala

  1. I believe they will play all five games.
  2. I will continue talking to myself. I've heard that the first game drew an estimated TV audience of 80million. That's larger than e-sports isn't it? Getting up to Superbowl sized figures. Also, this is from the front page from one of the chinese newspaper websites. "Lee seemed to have been slightly dominating by the middle of the match, but the mood was abruptly overturned as AlphaGo's mistakes began to be regarded as intentional moves from a broader perspective. At the first sight, AlphaGo made two fatal mistakes, which commentators described as algorithm errors and incomprehensible. The result was unpredictable until near the end due to the incomprehensible moves, which commentators said humans cannot imagine. It proved that AlphaGo's choices, which seemed to have been mistakes at the first sight, were right and calculated ones based on its predicted final result. AlphaGo's moves may look like mistakes from humans' perspectives and according to ways that professional human players learned how to play Go, but the result showed AlphaGo's broader perspective only aimed at winning an entire game despite losses in some parts of the board, experts noted." I'm glad there's now a break so I can have a proper night's sleep. (The games start 4am UK time!!!)
  3. That was an incredible game. in case anybody is wondering, it was pretty close. I think the estimated margin of victory was less than komi. And, I'm stunned that AlphaGo took more time to think than Lee. Truly incredible the amount of processing power required to beat the human brain. I expect the rest of the matches will be similar, but perhaps there is still hope.
  4. Yup. I'll be setting my alarm for 4am (UK time) to watch it tonight. My money (a whole £5) is on AlphaGo, but I'd love to see Lee Sedol win. I read earlier that Google have just given their biggest ever press conference about this (they're flown over to Korea, and there's a lot of interest in Asia generally). If AlphaGo manages to win, I doubt anybody can beat it.. it would be a huge coincidence for the technology to reach a level that is exactly between the current number 1 and current number 2 player in the world. And, Lee Sedol has 18 international titles to his name (I think that's only one player has ever managed more!). Whatever happens tonight, he still has better hair than the bot.
  5. Don't worry about winning and losing just now. Don't even worry too much about trying to play "the best" move. Just get used to playing moves and your brain will automatically start to recognise patterns (as long as you're paying attention).
  6. Agree 100% It sounded like Rob has only played the actual game once (with the previous two games being him figuring out how the game works). It was a good show, but it did leave me wanting more - the difference between the game being good, and the game becoming a classic part of the canon is how it stands up to repeat playing when both players know what they're doing. Does the game eventually turn into a bluffing game, rather than a "strategy" game? As that would be cool an interesting. But perhaps the mechanics only support a relatively low skill ceiling. Anyway, sounds like a cool game. Maybe if I ever find somebody to play WotR with again, I'll think about picking it up.
  7. yup. that's the main western server, and where I mainly play (tygem is where a lot of the Japanese/Chinese/Korean players play, but I wouldn't recommend a new player it to a new player). KGS is pretty good, fantastic community, but aging and slightly crap java interface. OGS has a much better web interface, but is quite new and the community is nowhere near as large. But it does offer correspondence games, so I play the odd game there. And DGS is another super simple correspondence site which I've used for years. If you want to learn the basics, then this site is useful. And there's a very good old proverb for new players: lose your first 100 games as quickly as possible. ie, don't worry too much about playing well, or winning. Just play. You'll start to recognize patterns and whatnot automatically.
  8. I can be, but it shouldn't be, and there's no (external) reason for it to be. So the sooner you get over it, the better. How about, I start: I'm more than happy to play correspondence games (ie, a couple of moves a day) games with anybody who asks. We can play either handicap games, or a teaching game (where I'll comment on your moves after you play them). I can also help tell you about servers, how to enter your rank, and find other beginners to play against.
  9. Better yet, just play against other real people. And ask stronger players to review your games.
  10. Frozen Cortex

    Wooben: I would just like to say: "phew"
  11. Frozen Cortex

    Well, Sorbicol has a copy... I'm sure we could find more people if we looked hard. RPS can be a good place to find people: https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?10-Game-Clubs-And-General-Sociability-Ok
  12. Frozen Cortex

    That's in Synapse. We're talking Cortex here, a whole different ball game [smug pun very much intended]
  13. Episode 343: XCOM 2

    Ha - Sorb, this is one of these rare situations in which we end up agreeing 100%. Chris Park would be another great guest designer to get back on and interview. Arcen may not be all that successfully (both in making "good" games and commercially) but they are certainly one of the most important and interesting strategy game studios around just now. Both the Kingdom and the Thea show would have been way more interesting if a designer had been invited on too. They were already good episodes, but I would have loved to have heard the designers responses.
  14. Frozen Cortex

    I'm pretty terrible at this game but happy to play any challengers My username is the same as here.
  15. Episode 342: Satellite Reign

    I think I agree (although I don't know that much of the genre). This is certainly the set up that I find more interesting. I'm starting to think that where my taste diverges from Rob's is that he's enjoys power fantasies too much for me. Sure, I enjoy winning, but I like to think that the winning was well earned (I'm either playing well in the game, or i've practise, studied and mastered the game's systems over multiple games). And without the possibility of everything going horribly wrong at any moment, the suspense goes and I feel like I'm a bit bored mindlessly hitting buttons. This is course, is all just my personal likes and dislikes. ie, one shotting an alien with 100% success in XCOM is boring. one shotting an alien with 50% chance, in a situation in which if you miss, your prized assult marine is going to be eaten, is a great feeling. And then, in a later mission, having a good sniper who you can depend on it s great feeling, as I feel like I've learnt it via playing well and keeping the gal alive for long enough. [And I can then play deeper strategies and get risk elsewhere]/ it does make me think that "the role of power fantasy in strategy games" would be an interesting topic for a show. I think they're fine in some genres (rpgs, fps?) but I don't enjoy them so much in strategy games. I find playing a game with easy systems and/or dumb AI similar to playing a weaker opponent at go or hearthstone, and its just not all that satisfying (for me). But then again, maybe I'd enjoy Ck2 more if I embraced the power fantasy and opted to play as a King/Emperor more often. So I could just well be wrong. Maybe it all comes from being Scottish, and constantly losing in the football and rugby? Perpetual underdog! And regardless of all this, it sounds like I really need to play Invisible Inc sometime soon.
  16. Episode 343: XCOM 2

    I haven't played XCOM2 yet (I decided years ago that life is to short to be playing PC games on release -even if there are no bugs, there will still be balance issues) . But i have to say, a few of the panelists on this show appear to have played XCOM1 far too much, and forgotten what it is like for a new player. Speaking as somebody late to the party, and still trying to complete the game the way it is meant to be played (classic ironman), I feel nearly all the criticisms the panel make of 2 could easily apply to 1. The game hides a lot of important information from the player (a good, if frustrating, design choice I feel, as it makes the aliens feel more alien and more dangerous - if the game told you how to go about beating the aliens and what all their strengths and weaknesses were off the bat, it would lose a lot). Overall, disappointing show. I'd much rather you all waited a month or two and then gave us some in-depth insightful commentary. 3MA is at its best when it's happily behind the times and discussing a game that's been patched by the devs, and played properly by the panelists. For example, even though I haven't yet played EU4, I still enjoy those shows as the game is mature and the panelists generally know exactly what they're talking about.
  17. Well said. Yes - a lot of AlphaGo's strength comes from cNNs, which have already revolutionized computer vision. That doesn't stop it being an incredible demonstration of how quickly the AI field is developing, and how generalisable a lot of the tech is. A friend made a video here outlining how some of the systems work:
  18. Then why not play a turn-based game? or, if you like the added pressure, you'd comparison to chess with a clock was an interestig one. Are there any (computer) turn based strategy games that use that mechanic? Feels like an interesting design space to explore. Imagine a game a little like Unity of Command, but you have a 10 min (+ 30s overtime periods) for a level? I am guessing that a lot of players would be put off by the idea of time limits on a tbs (which I get, as people often play to relax and may be checking their phone, etc while playing) which is a little odd when you remember that both chess and go are always played with some form of clock time when it is competitive. So it is already baked in to traditional turn based games!
  19. Sigh. I really need to complete some games so I can go back to Homeworld (remastered) and this!
  20. Also, I suspect making an algorithm that played more like an amateur Go player would be reasonably trivial now. Instead of training on pro games, you train on the millions of kyu game records on KGS, Tygem, etc. then simply restrict the number of possibilities investigated during tree search. I suspect that would lead to an AI that plays the same hopelessly optimistic mistakes that I (and many others) make from time to time. You could also go further and simply add in an "imaginary penalty" when scoring so the AI over-emphasis capturing its opponents stones and not losing its own stones. And, if we can get back to my original point about computer game AI... we don't need a Civ AI that can beat the best civ player in the world. there would be little point in making such a thing. But an AI who can match most players without cheating would be great. So we're looking at something around Prince/King level in Civ right (I have no idea what most Civ-fans play on, but I'm pretty sure that most strategy fans would be able to beat civ on normal after perhaps one practise game?). And you can easily mess with the heuristics to give the AI different personality (as I suggested above).... the heuristic they're trying to maximise doesn't need to be the victory condition. Perhaps you set the aggresive faction up so that it doesn't care about winning, it simply wants to maximise the number of enemy units it can kill over the whole course of the game. (this is just a daft example, as clearly this would lead to an AI that would avoid winning the game at all cost, as once the game has been won, it can't kill enemy units anymore!). but you get the idea right.
  21. You sound like you know what you're taking about. Watson winning Jeopardy is, IMO, way less an impressive feat than this. I read somewhere (sorry for not having the citation) that most of the Jeopardy answers are available straight from wikipedia. NLP isn't all that hard these days (sure, it's not a solved problem, but it works reasonably well a reasonable amount of the time). if anybody is interested, there is some commentary from a 9dan pro on the alphaGo games here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NHRHUHW6HQE.
  22. in which case you are wrong, and misunderstood my point. On the first point, a number of the top players in the world have said how surprised they are by how human AlphaGo appears to be in its play. For example, Ke Jie, the current number one player in the world has this to say: Q: Can you tell from the records that AlphaGo is not a human but a computer? A: No. I reviewed all five records but I didn't see the names of the two players. I had no idea which player is AI. AlphaGo plays like a human. It abandoned stones that should be abandoned, and made a concession when it is needed. AlphaGo plays in good balance and it is hard to imagine that it is a computer. Previous Go problems such as Zen, may, from time to time, make some nonsense moves. AlphaGo won't. It always plays important moves and that is strong.
  23. Somebody correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe that the methods used by DeepBlue were not as easy to generalise to other domains. It was a chess AI and that was that. However, the methods that behind AlphaGo are incredibly generalisable (cNNs and MCTS). You can download the caffe library for python and have a close to state-of-the-art library (it's used a lot in cutting edge academic research) for machine learning. So yes, you still need time, money and labour, and perhaps, more importantly, willpower to actually bother (see the terrible state of AI in Total War games). These tools are only going to become easier to use and interface with. The way it is more likely to happen is via mods, if a developer opens up the game enough. Then I can imagine some phd students (with access to their university's computing cluster) giving it a shot as a pet project. See this for a fun example of what people have done previously. And this was in 2011, a year or so before AlexNet blew the previous state of the art out of the waters. There are plenty of people smarter than I am who believe that these recent developments will usher in a step change similar in scope and magnitude to the internet. Have a read. http://www.computervisionblog.com/2015/11/the-deep-learning-gold-rush-of-2015.html. Another really cool application would be for procedural generation. Hand the cNN a high definition map of the whole globe, and it should be able to easily synthesis maps, globes, etc. On a less excitable note: I am rooting for Lee Sedol in his upcoming match against AlphaGo! I'm not sure I'd place money on the result, but I may well try and watch some of it live.
  24. Fantastic! like I said before, the difficult thing is to design a game which is fun when playing against a strong AI opponent. Civ and the ilk are games that are very much designed around the idea that the human player will win - the AI is there simply to through up some interesting challenges. With Go, I don't think I would enjoy playing a bot, as simply losing is no fun (although learning from stronger players is great). But I'm always more than happy to play against a stronger human player, as I can set myself the goal of making them think (or laugh at an unexpected move, etc).
  25. Not really. If you think about how the new Go AIs work, they use monte-carlo tree search algorithm, which has randomness built in, as it is impossible to read out every possibly move. So when the AI "thinks" about a move, it then randomly simulates loads of possible games from that point (and this is often done in a pretty crude manner) and concludes that it wins xx% of the games if it plays that move. It then does this for other moves, and then picks the move that gives it the best odds for winning. [i'm simplifying a lot, but this is the general gist as I understand it]. So fundamentally, there is no difficulty in adding in stochastic elements such as dice rolls and card packs. At all. I actually believe that this would make it easier to match human performance, as people are so bad at dealing with probabilities and rational decision making [and we're talking AI for consumer games here - it doesn't have to be able to beat the world champion, it just needs to be good enough to give a good game to most people without cheating]. If you'd like, I'd be happy to share some of my research on human decision making and how people fail at even the simplest choices when probability comes into the mix. Or, if you've heard of the Monty Hall Problem, you'll have the right idea. Anyway, lets not argue past each other any more. We can agree to disagree. If anybody is interested in learning go, a good place to start is here. Then after that, you can play at OGS (easier to use, but new and small community), KGS (java, but probably the main western online community?) or Tygem (crazy big, and where a lot of chinese, korean and japanese players play. Maybe not a good place for a new western player to start!)